Literature search for concrete academic ideas in the Agile Literature Review Approach (ALRA)

Literature search for concrete academic ideas in the Agile Literature Review Approach (ALRA)

E.g.: your theoretical framework level 0 includes the following component, among others:

Component 3: To evaluate the innovation capability of ABC Ltd.

When doing literature search, an obvious key word is “innovation capability”. Now when you formulate a research task based on some captured content of an academic article, you need to make use of a concrete academic idea that has clear actionable value in designing a research method to use in your project. Thus, the following research task is not satisfactory as being too broad with the academic idea used, i.e., “resource-based view”:

Research Task: To evaluate the innovation capability of ABC Ltd in terms of the resource-based view by conducting semi-structured interview with a few senior managers of ABC Ltd.

The following one is more useful as it adopts a more concrete academic idea, i.e., “employee-driven innovation”, from a particular academic article:

"Development methods for innovation capability Handbook of Innovation In employee-driven innovation, the employees contribute actively and systematically to the innovation process (Kallio, 2012). Innovations can emerge from any part of the organization and any employee group (Kesting & Ulhoi, 2010). A typical hindrance to employees’ innovativeness is that individual employees do not see it as part of their job. Feeling responsible for generating ideas increases the activity compared with ‘it is someone else’s job’ (Axtell et al., 2000; Kallio, 2012)..."; [Juhani Ukko, Minna Saunila, Satu Parjanen, Tero Rantala, Juho Salminen, Sanna Pekkola & Martti Mäkimattila (2016) Effectiveness of innovation capability development methods, Innovation, 18:4, 513-535, DOI: 10.1080/14479338.2016.1233824.]

Research task: To evaluate the usage, including its perceived usefulness, of employee-driven innovation activities to strengthen innovation capability of ABC Ltd. by means of semi-structured interviews with a few chosen middle managers.